“It’s a very beautiful, well-written book, an important book and obviously on a very important topic,” Shapiro said.

Holding a “Big Read” for the Jewish new year is new, but doing something different for the High Holy Days is not uncommon at B’nai Jacob. “I like to mix it up on the second day of Rosh Hashana,” Shapiro said. “I usually give some kind of discussion.”

“The book is a very personal history of Israel,” she said. “He tells the history of Israel in about 15 or 16 vignettes” — many from his own life — “each vignette from a different time period to capture something about Israel in a different time.”

She said Shavit, a native Israeli, has “tremendous love and admiration of and connection to his country [but] at the same time wrestles with the issues, problems that are inherent in Israel’s founding and ongoing in Israel’s political life.”

A blurb on the author’s Web page from The Jewish Week calls Shavit “a master storyteller” whose “retelling of history jars us out of our familiar retrospections, reminds us (and we do need reminders) that there are historical reasons why Israel is a country on the edge…required reading for both the left and the right.”

Shapiro said Shavit “believes that Israel needs to end the occupation because it’s corrosive to Israel. He doesn’t prescribe how to do that. … I don’t know that he believes that peace is attainable given the situation on the ground.”

Shapiro has selected two members of B’nai Jacob to serve as panelists and has asked congregants to submit questions, but there won’t be a general discussion of the book until a later date.

“Israel is a topic about which passions run high,” and she wants to avoid impassioned arguments during the holidays. But she said she hopes everyone has read the book and is willing to contribute their questions and comments.

“It’s a great practice. If everybody read one Jewish book a year and talked about it, that would be good,” she said.

“Books are challenging. Some people get stuck on the idea that they don’t agree with everything he says,” but that’s OK, Shapiro said. She said she agrees with Shavit’s book for the most part, “although it doesn’t fit me like a glove.”

“I feel that Israel is essential to our existence as Jews in America,” she said. “I feel tremendously proud of the huge accomplishments that Israel has made” since its founding in 1948.

And while she also would like the occupation of the West Bank to end, she too lacks a simple answer.

“The world is erupting right now” and the only country bordering Israel that has any stability is Egypt, which is “a bullet away from not being stable,” she said.

Meanwhile, Iran and several Arab countries have called for Israel to be erased from the map. “I just pray that Israel rides out” the political storm, Shapiro said.